This Is What I Want (11 page)

MAMA

Blanche wished for a lot of things. Too many, she suspected, which was why she was always mindful about ending her prayers with thanks for the bounty she’d already been given, so the merciful Lord didn’t think she was pressing her good fortune. What she wished for now, at this moment as her prodigal son circled her favorite grandson, was breath enough to say, “Sit down, the both of you,” and make it stick.
Lord, if you could just make this stop, I’d never ask for another thing from you.

Henrik, as usual, was overplaying his hand. He’d set upon the boy when Samuel had arrived with a plate of food, asking him questions in that rapid-fire, sneering way that made people so blasted uncomfortable around him. She’d tried, oh how she’d tried, to explain this to Henrik clear back to when he was a little boy, that too much offense creates an equal overabundance of defense. More flies with honey. Any cliché will do. The point is, she and Herschel had tried to break him of it long ago, and nothing much came of their efforts except for Henrik’s wounded pride.

Blanche laid back her head, drew in a raspy breath, and watched it unfold in her living room; how she wished Sam had come with his boy.

Uncle and nephew had moved off the topic of Samuel’s appearance back in town after so long—and Samuel’s backboned reply that Henrik had a hell of a lot of gall casting that particular stone, given his own ebb-and-flow absences and reappearances—and were now on the larger topic of family, and who had a right to speak and who should just remain silent.

“Just lay off my dad,” Samuel said.

“It’s between me and him, Junior.” That sneer again. “So you just keep your fag nose out of it.”

Samuel shrank from that. He balled up a fist, a follow-through Henrik would have relished, but then he faltered and moved back a couple of steps as the force of the words rushed over him.

Blanche had seen enough. She leaned over and retrieved her cane lying against the wall and rapped it hard on the wood floor three times, enough to leave her spent.

The squabbling men looked at her, and she thrust a finger at them in turn, silently telling Henrik to take the chair on her left and Samuel to set himself into the one on the right. Each did as she instructed, and Blanche gulped in breath and waited for reinforcement from the oxygenator.

When she felt as though she could speak again, she turned to Henrik. He hid behind that scolded-puppy-dog face, a hard enough sell when he was eight, and one she couldn’t countenance now.

“I won’t have it,” she said.

“Mama—”

“I won’t.”

She gulped air and put her attention on her grandson.

“Thank you for the food, Samuel. You go on home now.”

“I don’t think I should, Grandma. Not while he’s here.” At that, Henrik kicked at the floor but said nothing.

“You go.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, child.”

Samuel rose slowly, then leaned over to her. She watched Henrik as Samuel’s lips found her cheek. He never took his eyes off the boy, his face darkened by menace.
Such ugliness in that man. Where did we go wrong, Lord?

When at last Samuel was out the door and they heard his car start, back out the gravel driveway, and disappear into the night, Blanche turned a cold gaze on her son and said, “Whatever you want, whatever it is that will give this family peace, you must take it up with me. Do you understand?”

Henrik fell forward from the chair, onto his knees, and he crawled to his mother and lay his head in her lap. His shoulders heaved and quivered, and she set her hands on his head and whispered to him. With each word that passed her lips, the violent outpouring of his body increased in fervor, until he’d expended everything he had. His mother stroked his hair, the way she had when he was but a boy and she could still see a world that would open itself to him.

She couldn’t say she saw such things now, but that hardly mattered. No mother worth the title throws in the towel on her own child. There wasn’t much she could do for Henrik, and she didn’t hold out much hope that he would do for himself. But the love never stops. That’s the way Blanche had it figured, and she slid her fingers through his hair again.

RALEIGH

Raleigh Ridgeley had been a public figure for twenty years, and he’d come to learn a few things about the privilege. His audiences were mostly female, and in the wake of his first book and all its renown, it had been quite the surprise to him to learn that these women were predominantly interested in more than whatever book he was shilling. He’d noticed it first with
The Biggest Space
. There he was, thirty-three years old and unhappily married, a Billings PR man by day and a slave to his manuscripts by night, and it all happened seemingly at once: publication, glowing
New York Times
review, National Book Award finalist, being flown around the world to writers’ conferences. And at every single one of them, threaded among the tweed jackets and the academics and the fawning and ambitious MFA candidates, he’d find women who knew his book and assumed, by extension, that they knew him just as intimately. He learned the signals. The unyielding smile. The light brush of a hand upon his. The eyes that lingered a beat too long. He knew, and he allowed himself the fruits of such knowledge.

Now, he looked across the table at Patricia Kelvig, once the object of his secret teenage lust, and he picked up on the same pulses. She laughed at his jokes, no matter how slight. She twirled her hair. She leaned forward when he spoke. The difference between Patricia and every fan to whom he’d given the vapors was that she actually did know him, from a time long before he’d been touched by fame. And that, he thought, was perilous and seductive in equal quantities.

“I’m glad we came inside,” she said. “It’s too loud out there.”

By Raleigh’s reckoning, inside the Sloane Hotel was only marginally better than outside. Stone Cold Cherry was two doors down, ripping through the holy canon of southern-fried rock, and the muffled reverb sent ripples through Raleigh’s old-fashioned and Patricia’s coffee.

“That’s not what I had in mind when I said I’d buy you a drink,” he said, pointing at her cup.

Patricia wrapped her hands around it. “That’s as daring as it gets for me, mister. One cocktail would do me in.”

“I’m not seeing the problem with that.”

“You wouldn’t!”

He laughed, because that’s what would be expected in such repartee, but there it was again: the peril of their familiarity. She could reduce him to his barest components, if she wished.

He hunkered down, physically and in voice. “Should we talk about this morning?”

Patricia, bless her, didn’t straighten her back or withdraw or give any facial suggestion that his inquiry was unwelcome.

“I don’t know. Should we?” she said.

“I’d like to. If it’s not too uncomfortable.”

“OK.”

Now it was Raleigh’s own spine that went stiff and his own chair that slid back, if only a smidge.

“It was an impulse,” he said.

“Yes.”

“But it came from somewhere real. It was something I felt—I feel—deeply.”

He watched her as she considered that, her half smile sympathetic and her eyes glistening and soft. She bore him no anger; that much had been obvious back at the park, but he searched for some indication of where her heart lay with regard to this matter, and he could not find it.

“It felt like you felt it,” she said.

“I did.”

“I’m glad.”

“You left so quickly,” he said. “I wondered all day what you thought of it.”

She looked now at her coffee, and it seemed to Raleigh as if she were seeking the answers she couldn’t conjure. “I’m sorry I made you wonder,” she said. “I liked it, and that’s why I had to go.”

“I don’t under—”

“No, Raleigh, I think you do.”

He slumped in his chair. Nothing here matched his expectations.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She reached for his hand, and she forced his reluctant fingers to lace with hers.

“Don’t ever be,” she said. “Now, will you walk me home?”

They brushed past the Farm and Feed on Main before turning up Ellison and pushing west, toward the Kelvig house. Raleigh wondered, not for the first time, if he’d played it wrong all those years ago, beating a furious exit to the East Coast and college and as far away from Grandview as a train ticket and his own wherewithal would take him. By his midtwenties, both of his parents were gone, and that cut his final ties with the place until fame finally brought him home again.
Had I stayed,
he thought,
I could have been the one with a thriving little supply store, two kids, and Patricia Norby on my arm.
Would he have traded all of the running away, and everything good it brought him, for the one person who might have made him stay? That was the unanswerable question.

He kept his hands jammed in his back pockets as they walked on. The kid, Samuel, had come to see him at a signing in Mill Valley last year, and they’d had a cup of coffee afterward. Nice kid, and a marker for how much time Raleigh had let slip by in his own self-aggrandizement. Samuel had grown up, earned a degree, made a life for himself in California. They spent the better part of an hour talking, and Raleigh gleaned enough from the conversation to know that not everything was as it seemed back on the home front. The kid bore an animus for his father. It wasn’t anything he said explicitly. It lay in the arrangement of the words, the way they were deployed, and particularly in the ones he didn’t use at all. Raleigh had wondered then and wondered now whether a finer examination of the family’s masonry would reveal other fault lines. Did that make him a scavenger, picking through the bones of other lives for his own sustenance? By definition, he supposed it did. But Patricia.
Oh, Patricia
. Maybe she would be worth that.

He caught her eye, and they smiled at each other again, and Raleigh let go of some of the earlier embarrassment. He’d dreamed of this so many times in his callow youth, that he could find the gumption to squire her through these streets. Back then, he knew the houses and the people in them—some of them, anyway—and he couldn’t wait to get away, but if he’d had Patricia Norby, well, he’d have had some gravitas that was denied him then. The people in this town mostly deserved their lot, always groveling for the next boom, but he’d long believed that Patricia settled for too little.

In the alley behind the Kelvig house, out of the powder spray cast by the streetlamp, Patricia took his hand. Together, they walked behind the garage. Raleigh nervously scanned the adjoining houses for lights in windows, finding only darkness, his heartbeat rising over the ongoing thump from downtown. She pressed him against the wooden doors, and he let her. She moved into him and brought her lips to his, and he tasted her. And when he reached for her hips, she let go and stepped back, out of his grasp.

“Never be sorry,” she said, and then she left him, running past the garage and through the backyard grass to the front of the house, the soles of her shoes clapping against the concrete driveway.

He stood in the darkness, and he waved at the nothingness in her wake.

PATRICIA

She shut the front door behind her and leaned against it, eyes closed and her heart doing the rumba in her chest.

“Hi, Mom.”

Eyes fluttered open. Samuel sat at the dining room table in the dark.

“You frightened me,” Patricia said.

“Sorry.”

She gathered herself as best she could, feeling foolish just the same. That moment with Raleigh, bad as she wanted it, had been reckless. She wouldn’t have done it had she known Samuel was here and awake. Once she had her breath back, she stepped through the kitchen to join him. She flipped on a light, then sat down in the opposite chair. “I thought you’d be downtown seeing some of your friends.”

“Didn’t feel like it.”

“Everybody else asleep?”

“Yeah.”

She reached for him, covering his hand with hers. He didn’t retract. A small breakthrough, that, after the hesitation and uncertainty of the afternoon.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. She knew that something was, of course. A mother always knows. More than that, Samuel had never been able to keep distance between his feelings and her, and for that she had given thanks untold times. And wasn’t it funny how that worked? She and Sam had two children, created in the same way, her egg and his seed, brought up in the same house, fed the same food and given the same water, raised up in the same church, and they couldn’t be more different if they tried. Denise seemingly had come out of the womb with a point of view and using selfishness as a blunt weapon. Samuel was the quiet, eager-to-please child, the one who was disarmingly comfortable talking about his feelings. Until he wasn’t, of course. That had come later, and she and Sam were still reeling from it.

“I ran into Uncle Henrik at Grandma’s,” he said.

“Oh?”

“He really hates Dad.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Mom, yeah, he does. You should have heard the things he said.”

Patricia gave up on the bluff. She could only imagine what Samuel had heard, and when it came to her husband’s brother, her imagination could be vivid indeed. Her own experiences with Henrik ran a short gamut from uncomfortable to offensive, and she’d been happy enough to see his repeated failed ventures carry him away from Grandview for much of the past twenty or so years. It was a view she kept to herself, though, because Sam didn’t share it. To him, the breach with his big brother was a wound that couldn’t be sutured, and one he took personally. Being a Norby, Patricia had learned early on that survival meant cutting and running from those who would do you harm, even—no,
especially
—if they were family. But Sam was a Kelvig, and the Kelvigs put more stock in the merits of blood.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“Yeah. A little rattled. Grandma told me to go home. I’ve been sitting here for an hour, wondering if I should go back. I didn’t want to leave her with him.”

Patricia squeezed her son’s hand. “You don’t need to worry about her. Your grandmother’s a tough old bird. Henrik wouldn’t cross her.”

“But Dad.”

Yes,
Patricia thought,
there is that
. The brotherly relationship was more difficult to plumb. Sam was the one who’d done well, who’d been true, who’d stuck to his responsibilities. That made him a good man, but none of it would ever make him the big brother. Henrik had a mighty big trump card, and he knew well how and when to play it.

“Your father will handle it,” she said.

He looked up at her. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Is Dad telling people about me? You know . . .”

Patricia felt the bottom drop out of her. “What happened?”

“Uncle Henrik called me a fag.”

“And you think your father—”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Damn the trepidation that has seized hold of us,
Patricia thought. She wanted nothing more than to go to Samuel now, take him in, hold him, comfort him, and still she stayed rooted to her side of the table, unsure of the reception that move would receive in these frosted-over times. As to the question of Sam’s loose tongue, she’d made it clear to him that family business was not for public consumption, though she knew well that her actual control in that area was limited. In any case, she couldn’t imagine any conversation with Henrik that would lead to such a revelation.

“Son, no, your father wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“OK.”

He didn’t sound convinced. Patricia figured she’d have to go deeper.

“When you were here last, we were—”

“Shocked?” he said.

“Taken aback. We hadn’t expected—that is, we didn’t know—we don’t have any experience with this. It surprised us.”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to surprise you. It was unavoidable.”

Patricia exhaled. She’d wanted this for so long, a way into this tangled briar.

“Your dad has struggled.” She put it out there. What she needed now was a way to set a road between them. This struck Patricia as the route forward. “You know, he was raised a certain way, he believes certain things, and this wasn’t part of that. It’s not that he doesn’t love you. He does. I do. We do. It’s just—”

“I’m a heathen.” When the words came out, Patricia’s thoughts flew at once to alarm, and she wanted to smother that notion so he couldn’t resuscitate it. When she saw that he was smiling, the tension left her. Still, he had no idea just how close his assessment hewed to reality. They had gone to see the Reverend Franklin in the aftermath of Samuel and Derek’s visit and the subsequent botched attempt at a redo. Their hearts were burdened, and their attempts to ease the load for each other had only threatened to drive a wedge into their marriage. Patricia had come to view that visit as a mistake. The pastor had counseled them in the ways of love and intolerance—love the sinner, hate the sin. She had found it completely inapplicable to their son, their flesh and blood, the greatest thing either of them would ever do. That was her take. Sam, on the other hand, found reinforcement for his lifelong grounding in scripture, and now he and Patricia were poles apart, anyway, the very situation they’d hoped to avoid.

“You’re not a heathen,” she said, soft as Sunday. And then: “I’m glad we’re talking about this.”

“I am, too. I wish Dad were here, instead of in there asleep.”

“You can talk to him, too.”
You need to
, she might have added. This was a message she couldn’t carry to Sam. Samuel would have to find a way across the gap between them.

“Derek and I broke up,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” It occurred to her then that she actually was, and that was a revelation. She had consigned Derek to being a problem in their lives rather than a living, breathing object of love in their son’s. She flushed with shame. “When?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Are you OK?”

He sighed and rocked back in his chair, and she had to swallow the urge to scold him the way she used to about keeping all four legs on the ground. “I guess.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“You cared for him, didn’t you?”

“Mom, I love him.”

In the cracking of his voice, in the plaintive way he said it, the curiosities fell away and the commonalities moved forward, and Patricia thought that maybe she understood her son in a way she hadn’t before. She’d seen heartbreak. She knew it. She’d endured a slow-motion unfurling of it these past several years with Sam, as active, pulsing love took a secondary position to expedient need and the narcoleptic inertia of the day-to-day. Viewed in abstractions, love is the same thing for everybody. It thrills the same way, and devastates with bloodless efficiency.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am.”

“I know.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

He sniffed. “No. I just need time and distance. That’s the only cure.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

She made her move. She stood and she went around the table, coming up behind him. She dropped her chin onto his shoulder and draped him with her arms, and then he was all hers again, a full-grown, whiskered man who was still her little boy. She nuzzled him, the way she would do when he was a toddler, and she would gather him up and say, in that teasing singsong voice, “Be my baby.”

He covered her hands with his, and they swayed together, and the house swaddled them in silence.